Victoria
Book Review – Rift
Author: Melody Tiamat Publisher: Dragon’s Hoard Publishing Binding: Paperback Publication Date: February 2002 Dragons are small on the planet of Rift. In fact, they look a lot like lizards and, aside from being sentient and inclined towards cheeky banter, have more in common with your average Gecko than with Glaurung or Smaug. Nevertheless, they’re still [...]
Book Review – Ammey McKeaf
Author: Jane Shoup Publisher: Lethal Publishing Binding: Paperback Publication Date: February 2002 Let me start with a synopsis of doom, replete with interjections in square brackets […]: It begins with a Prologue, as these wretched things often do. The first person narrator, once a denizen of the now-lost island of Azulland – which, we are [...]
Book Review – The Rose in Twelve Petals and Other Stories
Author: Theodora Goss Publisher: Small Beer Press Binding: Paperback Publication Date: October 2004 Theodora Goss only began publishing her short fiction and poetry in 2002 but already her work has appeared in some of the genre’s most respected publications (including “Realms of Fantasy”, “Strange Horizons”, “Polyphony” and “Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet”). No less than 6 [...]
Book Review – Winter’s Tale
Author: Mark Helprin Publisher: Harvest Books Binding: Paperback Publication Date: March 10, 1995 Mark Helprin wrote Winter’s Tale in the years before I was born and it entered the world in 1983, as did I. But whereas I’ve had to wait 22 years for my moment in the spotlight (and, let me tell you, being [...]
DVD Review – King Kong
Director: Peter Jackson Starring: Jack Black, Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody Studio: Universal Pictures Release Date: December 13, 2005 If you’d just finished making the three biggest fantasy movies in the world ever, if you’d just shot to stardom as an epitome of epic cinema, if you’d got the studios banging on your door day and [...]
Movie Review – The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Director: Andrew Adamson Starring: Tilda Swinton, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Liam Neeson Studio: Disney Release Date: December 9, 2005 There’s been a lot of talk about Walt Disney’s adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe”. Some people have bemoaned the ethics of “a polemic made flesh” on the screen, while [...]
Book Review – The Silences of Home
Author: Caitlin Sweet Cover Artist: Ted Nasmath Publisher: Penguin Binding: Paperback Publication Date: 2005 After my review of A Telling of Stars and my interview with Caitlin Sweet, I must admit that I was slightly apprehensive about reading, and then reviewing, her second novel The Silences of Home. What, I asked myself, would I do [...]
Book Review – Tolkien and the Great War
Author: John Garth Publisher: Voyager Binding: Paperback Publication Date>: 2003 “One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved [...]
Book Review – The Confusion
Author: Neal Stephenson Publisher: William Heinemann Binding: Paperback Publication Date: April 2004 “The Confusion” constitutes Part II of Neal Stephenson’s gargantuan “Baroque Cycle”, an SF saga of “history, adventure, science, invention, sex, absurdity, piracy, madness, death and alchemy” set in a late, mildly alternate 17th century. And it is a BIG book in more ways [...]
On the Spot at BSC – Caitlin Sweet interview
Since publishing her debut novel A Telling of Stars (2003) with Penguin, Canadian Caitlin Sweet has joined the burgeoning ranks of young, innovative fantasy genre writers. She has since released a prequel to A Telling – The Silences of Home (2005). Both novels have received high praise for their lyrical prose and emotional potency, and [...]
Book Review – Stranger Things Happen
Author: Kelly Link Cover Artist: Shelley Jackson Publisher: Small Beer Press Binding: Paperback Publication Date: July 2001 I can safely say that I’ve never met a Kelly Link story that I didn’t like, and, after re-reading her alchemical debut collection “Stranger Things Happen”, I’m just about ready to tell you why. First, a little recap… [...]
Book Review – Lord of Emperors
Author: Guy Gavriel Kay Publisher: Penguin Canada Binding: Paperback Publication Date: November 2002 Let me begin candidly: “Lord of Emperors” only confirms the burgeoning suspicion I had at the end of “Sailing to Sarantium”. The “Sarantine Mosaic” is, for me, one of *the* superior works of prose, plot and imagination, not only in the fantasy [...]
